AHC/WI: France adopts natalist policies after Franco-Prussian War

BigBlueBox

Banned
In the 19th century, French birthrates declined and the growth of the French population stagnated. Meanwhile, the population of the German states grew rapidly. This was one of the factors for France’s decline and rise of Germany and France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Is it possible for the French government to recognize this and adopt natalist policies after the Franco-Prussian War, and if so, how successful would those measures be?
 
In the 19th century, French birthrates declined and the growth of the French population stagnated. Meanwhile, the population of the German states grew rapidly. This was one of the factors for France’s decline and rise of Germany and France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Is it possible for the French government to recognize this and adopt natalist policies after the Franco-Prussian War, and if so, how successful would those measures be?

Natalist policies don't really work and there's also a question of what happens with the absence of money invested into such policies ATL; does Russia receive less French capital for investment or are French colonial expansions reduced? If Russia gets less, they could either be even less effective in a general conflict or they could, taking the lack of French investment, realign with Germany as the Tsar and Kaiser attempted in the early 1900s. If they reduce colonial expansions, what's the effects of that? A bigger German Kamerun? No Sino-French War?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Natalist policies don't really work and there's also a question of what happens with the absence of money invested into such policies ATL; does Russia receive less French capital for investment or are French colonial expansions reduced?
Giving money to families who have children isn’t the only natalist policy. You can do the inverse: raise taxes on people who don’t have children. The Warsaw Pact countries did this and it was certainly better than nothing.
 
In this time wouldn't simply increasing welfare, thus lowering child mortality -still quite high in that age-, function to increase population quite a bit?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
In the 19th century, French birthrates declined and the growth of the French population stagnated. Meanwhile, the population of the German states grew rapidly. This was one of the factors for France’s decline and rise of Germany and France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Is it possible for the French government to recognize this and adopt natalist policies after the Franco-Prussian War, and if so, how successful would those measures be?

Policies to raise birth rates generally work poorly even if well funded. These policies work worse than policies to lower birth rates. If you are trying to persuade me not to have a kid, I gain the state incentive plus the avoid cost of the kid. If you want me to have a kid, you have to pay me the cost of the kid before I have an incentive.

So to use modern USA terms, I might well be looking for 250K to 500K of lifetime incentives before I flipped from "I don't want any kids". On the other hand, 50K so I could go to a more elite college might look like a monsterously large payment for sterilization.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
In this time wouldn't simply increasing welfare, thus lowering child mortality -still quite high in that age-, function to increase population quite a bit?

Yes. If sanitation is poor, that should be fixed. Free or subsidized health care would probably work, but at some point too high a survival rate for kids means women have fewer kids. Things like modern American school lunches would help a lot.

One might also want to look at the age of marriage. We want to make sure that there are not people wanting to marry who can not afford a living space or the like.
 
Natalist policies don't really work and there's also a question of what happens with the absence of money invested into such policies ATL; does Russia receive less French capital for investment or are French colonial expansions reduced? If Russia gets less, they could either be even less effective in a general conflict or they could, taking the lack of French investment, realign with Germany as the Tsar and Kaiser attempted in the early 1900s. If they reduce colonial expansions, what's the effects of that? A bigger German Kamerun? No Sino-French War?
There were a number of French pro-natalists who were vigorously colonialists and believed that the way to raise the French birth rate was through a virile policy of colonial expansion which would send settlers into new lands, where they would be more fecund than in France. Furthermore French colonial expansion generally wasn't centralized in Paris, although there were political connections back to Paris: the exception being Morocco. There's no real reason why the French politicians wouldn't pursue both in response to situations of the ground, as soldiers push forwards the flag and it is impossible to back down.

A lot of pro-natalism is relatively "cheap" too, like banning abortion, banning contraceptives, propaganda about how great children are, handing out medals and awards and rewards for having children, glorifying motherhood, implementing conservative social policies, etc. One would have to specifically provide what sort of pro-natalism the French are doing following the 1870s to decide if it is going to be expensive or not. My guess it probably wouldn't be, but instead be a program to buttress perceived traditional values, or even revenue positive - bachelor taxes were discussed in the 1890s when the problem of low birth rates and declining population was brought up.

You are quite right that the effect would be marginal though. There might be some slight impact, but it wouldn't be that big.
 
The problem will this is that the Pro-Catholic elements of the country are on the downswing post-1870 and the Liberals are gaining steam... precisely the opposite of what you'd want to get this kind of policy
 
France OTL was one of the first countries to be concerned about low birth rates and did introduce pro-natality policies, although I'm not certain when it started.
 
Policies to raise birth rates generally work poorly even if well funded. These policies work worse than policies to lower birth rates. If you are trying to persuade me not to have a kid, I gain the state incentive plus the avoid cost of the kid. If you want me to have a kid, you have to pay me the cost of the kid before I have an incentive.

So to use modern USA terms, I might well be looking for 250K to 500K of lifetime incentives before I flipped from "I don't want any kids". On the other hand, 50K so I could go to a more elite college might look like a monsterously large payment for sterilization.

In the modern world, the best pro-natalist policy I can think of would be to abolish old-age pensions and instead make children legally liable for their retired parents' upkeep. Though I doubt France had a state pension system in the 1870s, so this option probably wouldn't be available to them (though perhaps they could refrain from introducing them in order to encourage more child-bearing?).
 
There were a number of French pro-natalists who were vigorously colonialists and believed that the way to raise the French birth rate was through a virile policy of colonial expansion which would send settlers into new lands, where they would be more fecund than in France. Furthermore French colonial expansion generally wasn't centralized in Paris, although there were political connections back to Paris: the exception being Morocco. There's no real reason why the French politicians wouldn't pursue both in response to situations of the ground, as soldiers push forwards the flag and it is impossible to back down
Interesting you mention Morocco as it's Lyautey's turf.
One thing of his I remember reading is that France could get new, fresher blood through colonisations after 1870.
Now you can read this in 3 ways:
Like you did, with French settlers able to have bigger families in New lands
As an incentive to get more immigrants like Spanish ones in Algeria
Or as an advice to actively mingle with the subjects to get higher numbers

I always read it as the last one, but I'm not sure he's very representative of the colonial establishment
 
In the modern world, the best pro-natalist policy I can think of would be to abolish old-age pensions and instead make children legally liable for their retired parents' upkeep. Though I doubt France had a state pension system in the 1870s, so this option probably wouldn't be available to them (though perhaps they could refrain from introducing them in order to encourage more child-bearing?).

Riight. Because young people--who by the mathematics of human longevity will always be a greater share of the population than the elderly in the long term--will stand for that. Not to mention it's horribly unfair for people unable to give birth, and possibly illegal in many such countries under constitutional law.

IMO, the best pro-natalist policy for the Third Republic would be investing in church schools teaching their students to "be fruitful and multiply" instead of public education, if anything at a net benefit to the public treasury if the Church or private donors are paying a portion of the cost per student, but such will result in a...very different interpretation of laicite.
 

Marc

Donor
Why would you want to short circuit the tremendous expansion of the petite bourgeoisie, moyenne bourgeoisie, grande bourgeoisie, et haute bourgeoisie?
They are the core of modern French society. There is a thesis is that their expansion is in very large part due to the birthrate dynamics.
 
Giving money to families who have children isn’t the only natalist policy. You can do the inverse: raise taxes on people who don’t have children. The Warsaw Pact countries did this and it was certainly better than nothing.

But how effective were said policies?
 
There were a number of French pro-natalists who were vigorously colonialists and believed that the way to raise the French birth rate was through a virile policy of colonial expansion which would send settlers into new lands, where they would be more fecund than in France. Furthermore French colonial expansion generally wasn't centralized in Paris, although there were political connections back to Paris: the exception being Morocco. There's no real reason why the French politicians wouldn't pursue both in response to situations of the ground, as soldiers push forwards the flag and it is impossible to back down.

They may wish to pursue both but the issue remains of finance: if you're paying out lots of Francs to have babies, thats Francs that don't go to funding colonial expeditions.

A lot of pro-natalism is relatively "cheap" too, like banning abortion, banning contraceptives, propaganda about how great children are, handing out medals and awards and rewards for having children, glorifying motherhood, implementing conservative social policies, etc. One would have to specifically provide what sort of pro-natalism the French are doing following the 1870s to decide if it is going to be expensive or not. My guess it probably wouldn't be, but instead be a program to buttress perceived traditional values, or even revenue positive - bachelor taxes were discussed in the 1890s when the problem of low birth rates and declining population was brought up.

Which was mostly the case in 19th Century life anyway and we've had plenty of examples of trying this same thing in the 20th and 21st century; impacts were non-existent at worst and negligible for a duration at best.
 
Honestly the easiest way to raise birth rate in country with a rural majority would simply be to change inheritance rules, so that the odest son inherited the farm, while the other child got a pittance. That remove a incentive for small families, but also ensured a large source of potential industrial workers and migrants to any colonies.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Honestly the easiest way to raise birth rate in country with a rural majority would simply be to change inheritance rules, so that the odest son inherited the farm, while the other child got a pittance. That remove a incentive for small families, but also ensured a large source of potential industrial workers and migrants to any colonies.
What were Mao's population policies? I mean, he tried to inflate Chinese population in case of a nuclear war.
 
They may wish to pursue both but the issue remains of finance: if you're paying out lots of Francs to have babies, thats Francs that don't go to funding colonial expeditions.
The problem is that you don't understand what sort of proposals the French had for raising the birth rate: none of them were large government intervention programs. The only thing I can think of among the list that was introduced was the family allocation schemes, but its fully possible to have a pro-natalist scheme without that, and even if it was introduced, its relatively easily supportable given that the French social welfare system was not very costly in the first place. The 1896 proposals and those in the years following when the issue was first seriously brought up included that, but the rest was all cheap and favoritism schemes or punitive: prizes, school benefits, military service reductions for fathers, taxes on bachelors, faster promotion for bureaucrats with more children, maternity leave, some discussion about changing inheritance laws, etc. Restrictions on abortion and contraceptives fall into the same manner.

The modern French pro-natalism is the product of a society which is markedly different from the 1870 one and which has far larger tools for state intervention. The 1870 proposals wouldn't be seeing the great expenses that the current French state provides, but instead as part of a effort to regenerate and revitalize society along conservative lines, which is something which will for the most part be done on the cheap, since it will be viewed as a moral struggle first and foremost, and not one which requires the state itself to be the principal actor.

Which was mostly the case in 19th Century life anyway and we've had plenty of examples of trying this same thing in the 20th and 21st century; impacts were non-existent at worst and negligible for a duration at best.
You're both not reading my post as I state that later on, and not understanding it: the focus is not whether these would work, but what sort of proposals would be implemented. These were all the sort of proposals that were later on discussed or introduced in the possible liberal framework of the IIIrd Republic.

Interesting you mention Morocco as it's Lyautey's turf.
One thing of his I remember reading is that France could get new, fresher blood through colonisations after 1870.
Now you can read this in 3 ways:
Like you did, with French settlers able to have bigger families in New lands
As an incentive to get more immigrants like Spanish ones in Algeria
Or as an advice to actively mingle with the subjects to get higher numbers

I always read it as the last one, but I'm not sure he's very representative of the colonial establishment
Generally the idea was as you said not focused on mingling with the natives, the French pro-natalists who were interested in colonial settlement had some evidence, I don't know if it was real or not but they believed it, that French settlers in overseas territories like Algeria had much higher birth rates than back at home. So their idea was to focus on aiding colonial settlement, which was a dramatic reversal of previous beliefs which held that emigration overseas would depopulate France. It has been a while since I have read A Colonial Fountain of Youth: Imperialism and France's Crisis of Depopulation, 1870-1940 unfortunately, so I would have to re-read it again to provide additional detail.
 
But how effective were said policies?
Well we can say for Czechoslovakia it more or less worked. Population in 1921 was 14.8 mil. After WWII when some 380K were killed and 3 million Germans expelled and Ruthenian was annexed by USSR first census was held only in 1950. Results was 12.31 million. In 1992 when Czechoslovaks decided to split the country population was 15.7 million.

Sharp decline in population in both countries - Czech Republic as well as Slovakia came in 90-ties.

Before 1990 population of Czech Republic and Slovak republic was rising much sharply then population of Austria. After 1990 Austria kept its climb (possible due to immigration too) while Czech and Slovak numbers dropped. Possibly due to emmigration too.
 
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